Work hard

Blair spies the foot sequence at Sky Pilot last week

Last week I found it hard not to get impatient with the poor weather – too cold or wet for Echo Wall sessions and trying to remind myself that a couple of weeks of hard endurance training is exactly what the doctor ordered anyway.

Nice rainbow from my window, but when will those clouds clear off the Ben again??

I’ve sussed out the sequence for the mammoth 30 metre traverse of Sky Pilot and feeling close to doing it in overlapping halves right now. It could hardly be more perfect endurance training for the big one – steep, powerful and totally sustained for 60 moves to a kneebar rest (I need to train knee endurance in the same knee for the kneebar on Echo wall too!) and then another 20 or so the end. The big link will probably be F8c+ or V13ish.

But some aches and pains coming from a tricep tendon have called for two much needed days off. I’ll be back up for there in the morning to get to work again after some TLC for my tricep in the gym and sauna. By night I have been working on this website to add more of the content I am frequently asked for in the articles pages. Right now I’m writing on everything to elbows to how to find good climbing in Scotland when it’s raining or when the mighty midge reigns proud. I should have all of this ready this week.

Dave Brown told me Steve McClure returned to complete the second repeat of Rhapsody at Dumbarton Rock today. Great to see the place getting some attention from the world’s best! I’m glad to see that Steve, like Sonnie, managed to avoid taking the bad fall (from the last couple of moves), only taking their falls from lower down which is more of a ‘bungy jump’ than wall slammer. I don’t like to dwell too much on routes from the past, but it has been a pleasure to watch two of my climbing heroes travel to and climb a route that I made. That’s cool.